Bunnie discussed Moore’s law (and the breakdown thereof) at the OSHW conference and we discussed on episode 61 of The Amp Hour (with Jeff!), around 20 minutes in.

We asked why he decided to use Marvell chips, as opposed to a more open chip company like Freescale (in relative terms).

Thanks again to Bunnie for taking the time to talk about his work and his philosophy on design. We hope you all enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed talking to him! Please leave any unanswered questions in the comments and we’ll try to follow up by next week!

Note: We changed the encoded volume of the podcast so we don’t blow anyone’s eardrums out when they jump from their favorite NPR podcast (Car Talk, duh) to ours or whatever else you’re listening to. Sorry if this has been an issue in the past.

Good show. I would have like to hear more about Bunnies design process and how one person can create such a complicated hardware product like the NeTV. What tools he uses, how he designs for high frequency, validation process, etc.

High frequency design — well, the fastest I get on design work I do is 533 MHz (DDR2/3 busses). It’s not that fast and usually I’m just wiring up one or two chips to a CPU — I can still get away with solid design rules and discipline at that level of design, and a good bit of oscope probing with an active probe post-design to validate signal margins.

If I do anything with RF, it’s usually a module, or if it’s got an on-board antenna I’ll just copy the app note very precisely. I don’t have a license for Ansoft HFSS or anything like that to model these things….the HDMI stuff does get to Gbit-speeds, but the wires are also kept to < 1cm in length simply because I lack the validation tools to do anything longer than that (this explains the long-standing gripe of why the HDMI ports are located the way they are on the NeTV).

I use the EVT/DVT/PVT model for design validation to production. I try to do unit testing and continuous test automation when I can.

Hey guys, another great show this week. I look forward to your shows every week. Bunnie was informative and entertaining.

One comment though… As others have commented in the past about you guys not introducing the guests, you guys jumped straight into Chumby talk for 15 minutes and never even told us what a Chumby is!!! I was in the car so I could not look it up till I got home.

“Liquid work” is just my phrase for music that gets me in the zone. If I’m not focused or unable to get into something, I just mainline some liquid work (i.e., crank the volume up) and I start getting work done.